Last week we were all on the edge with the weatherman warning us about Hurricane Matthew and the path it was headed. By Wednesday they were predicting the hurricane to come dangerously close to the Florida shore. We started getting ready by hitting the local home depot and lowes to find some plywood to cover up the warehouse windows. Most of everything was sold out by now. Ended up paying $40 a plywood for some fancy siding board.
Luckily my house came with hurricane shutters. Unfortunately not the kind that you can just press a button for them to close. All 16 windows were covered by Aluminum shutters which wasn't that difficult to do, but was a little tricky doing the 2nd floor trying to balance on a ladder. By Thursday afternoon we had everything prepared. But were we prepared?
I turned on the news and there was a press conference with majors, governors, sheriffs, fire chiefs of multiple counties telling us all to get out, that this was nothing like the hurricanes we had 12 years. Perhaps they were right, looking at the eye path you could see it projected to make landfall right around Melbourne area on Friday morning. Winds reaching 140 mph. Storm surge expected to be 15 feet plus. Even Shephard Smith came on the national news and told us that we were going to die, that our children were going to die too.
Hearing how frantic everyone was on TV we decided to evacuate on late Thursday afternoon. It took a lot of convincing to get my wife to join us. Her father is a stubborn old Vietnam Vet and said he wasn't going anywhere, that the TV always played it this Bad ever since he could remember.
So there we were 2 kids, my wife and I, Aunt Sandy, Two Dogs and the kitten all packed up in the car ready to hit the road towards Ocala. My buddy Matt had left a few hours ago and said Route 40 was flowing nicely towards Ocala. And he was right, the roads were completely empty when we got out. The wind hadn't picked up yet, but it was like a zombie Apocalypse. We got all the way to Ocala in about an hour and half with the roads being completely empty. I thought it was going to be backed up all the way to Ormond.
We got to Ocala and started calling hotels, going on booking sites trying to find a hotel room. After an hour of searching there was no vacancies. So we decided to have dinner at Taco Bell and hit back home. The Drive back started getting interesting with the winds picking up slightly but nothing too serious.
We got back at the house around 10pm and locked up everything hoping for the best. When I went to bed the TV was saying it was going to make landfall around Daytona at 8am with 130 mph winds. I think it was 6 am when I woke up hearing the howling of the wind and gust. Couldn't see anything out the windows since they were all shuttered up. I checked my phone and it was saying the winds were only at 45 mph over our location. I started panicking, if 45 mph was sounding like this, what was 130 mph going to feel like! The power kept coming in and out. I took a peak out the front door to see the neighbors Palm tree snapped in half right next to my driveway. Luckily it didn't hit anything. Couldn't say the same thing for my neighbor across the street who had a palm tree snapped in half sitting over his roof.
I turned the TV on to hear some good news. Must have been an act of God. The eye path of the hurricane decided to take a wobble out to the east keeping the strongest winds over the ocean. The winds picked up till about 8 and gradually started to get less and less scarier towards the afternoon. The floods we were afraid of never happened. The roof blowing winds or tornadoes we were afraid of didn't happen either.
By about 4pm things were still windy but it was time to take a ride and see what all happened. I took a few photos of trees fallen down. Some were dragging the power lines with them. The streets looked really cozy with tree debris all over, especially the old man's beards that all fell from the oak trees gave the place a spooky look.
I have to say I got really lucky. Only lost power for about 30 minutes which was a miracle. We drove around on Saturday around the beach side seeing how bad things were over there. It didn't look like a war zone, in fact the mainland side looked worse than the beach side. I drove by my in laws old house that we sold just a few months ago. It had a whole bunch of shingles missing from the roof and that roof was barely a year old!
On my way back from the warehouse yesterday I took a ride around some trailer parks and it was a mess of metal sidings and roofs mangled up all over the place. It definitely is not a good idea to try to stay in your trailer home in an event like this. I saw entire roofs and side walls blown off.
However nothing compares to the damage Flagler saw on A1A. Take a look at this drone footage. A1A will definetely be under construction for a long time before this all gets fixed. With Biketoberfest coming up this weekend, it's going to be interesting to see if Bikers are going to be coming to check out the destruction first hand or not. I know a lot of hotels have damages done to them. If you are coming down for Biketoberfest check with your hotel reservation to see if everything is still good. Despite the property damage the death toll of the hurricane in Florida was nothing compared to what the poor fellas got over in Haiti and the Bahamas.
